Chee Wee Ang, the chief AI officer at Singapore’s Home Team Science and Tech Agency, a government agency that develops tech capabilities for national security, said AI has helped improve processes significantly. “Some of the information extraction … we see like 200% [improvement]. So that’s a significant improvement in terms of ROI,” Ang said. Yet Ang also pointed out that beyond improving productivity, AI advancements are allowing Singapore’s Home Team to do things that it couldn’t do before, like responding to new kinds of crime or emergency situations. Singapore’s Home Team has 10 departments, including the police force, emergency services, and immigration authorities. Ramine Tinati, the lead at Accenture’s APAC Center for Advanced AI said, “If you give employees a tool to do things faster, they do it faster. But are they more productive? Probably not, because they do it faster and then go for coffee breaks,” Tinati explained. Instead, “if you reinvent the work, then suddenly those coffee breaks don’t become meaningful anymore, because you’re doing something else,” Tinati said, adding that some companies in Asia may be slower to adopt AI because “they don’t think about reinventing the work.” May Yap, chief information officer at manufacturing solutions provider Jabil, said that her company had been using automation and AI to augment their so-called Golden Eye, the army of workers inspecting phones for scratches and blemishes. Golden Eye workers spend eight hours a day on inspections, and working that long means that “errors will creep in,” Yap said. AI helped to augment the inspection process to account for possible mistakes from human workers.